Egregoros

Tribalism (I'm gonna call it Izzat because it matches up very well) is a double-edged sword.

It provides significant advantage when you're a small tribe within a larger ecosystem, but as it tries to scale its power it starts to become consumed by freeloaders.

Someone like Epstein could be considered a "reputational freeloader". He gets the safety net while others pay the price (being disliked in their community). Same with Vivek, he's freeloading off of Indian tribalism to put money in his own pocket, and Indians of greater morals pay for his sins. Same thing with the BLM leaders who stole all of the money, etc etc etc

Here's the thing, and why I think Christian / Pegan / Unaffiliated individualism actually wins out in the end: Racism is checkmate on Izzat. In a massively interconnected post-privacy reality, if you look like a tribe and act like a tribe, you get judged like a tribe.

So either you have to self-police, or you disband. If you self-police, you have to police to a MUCH HIGHER STANDARD than average, because it only takes one psychopath to make viral mp4. So quickly all of the advantage of izzat gets dragged down by the cost of ensuring nobody in your group ever does anything scandalous.

The alternative is your best and brightest don't want to be associated with their worst co-ethnics, so they start marrying out of group and generally disassociate (the Irish and Italians in America basically did this). In this case, the tribe gets boiled down to some small band of mutants that don't have what it takes to make it outside of their bubble, and the world basically just leaves them behind.